Superman
by VeltPunch
Summary: She cried for the shattered memories and her aching heart. But most importantly, she cried for him.


_Kryptonite. _

She cried that day.

It wasn't long after the ground had begun to shake and the trees had uprooted themselves. The grass had been charred and yellowed, dispersed from there once verdant and vast fields into nothing but patches of sickly brown against equally sickly brown turned up dirt.

It couldn't have even been called a forest after that.

He had claws that could rip apart human vertebrae in less time it took to scream. Bubbling fiery tails of chakra the size of skyscrapers lit up the sky behind him, the welling ashen clouds of a storm gathering in the backdrop. The howls that resounded around the forests, whispering through the trees and shaking in the after effects, could be hard from places that weren't yet known on the continent.

It was frightful.

None of the shinobi countries had ever witnessed such a beautiful display of sheer power.

Thunder shook the continent, tsunamis lapped at the shore. Earthquakes tore apart the scenery, and the other shinobi villages learned that Konoha really did have a secret weapon.

Kyuubi.

And as the destruction stopped, the winds easing back into there light breezes, the only thing that greeted the young man that had caused such destruction was a bleeding red dusk and a smiling face.

She smiled at him, as she—only her, no one else had the confidence to approach him—as she walked the charred plains that was once a dense forest.

She smiled, her hair playing in the wind.

She took his burning hands and lifted him off the ground, even when he had slipped away from consciousness into the blissful silence of darkness.

When he awoke to the monotonous sound of beeping, he smelt her first. The soothing smell of nothing and yet everything-of things that could have been, of broken sorrows and shattered dreams-and the smell of a broken young woman, picking up the pieces of herself off the floor one by one.

When he opened his eyes, finally, _finally_ not a darkened blood shot crimson of a death carrying angel, but the clear blue of the point the ocean meets the sky.

She was sitting very calmly next to a pot of lavender and blossoming orchids, her shining green eyes flittering with emotion as his tired eyes met hers in a soft glance.

She smiled that time too.

"_Hey Superman, you awake yet?"_

It had been there not-so-funny running joke.

--((I really don't mind what happens now and then, as long as you'll be my friend at the end))

They met a lot more often after that.

Saying a broody dark haired little brat of a shinobi had ruined there already broken and hanging by a string friendship hadn't done them any good was saying that Shikamaru did _not _spend every waking moment watching clouds, or thinking of watching clouds.

Suffice to say that both of them were ready for a change.

Living in an obtuse circle of mundane life threatening crisis-day in and day out-was not an interesting way to live was an understatement.

Living such a life trying to hold onto a dream that was quickly fading away like a seashell on a beach was just being a little depressing.

It didn't take him very long to decide that, even though he was planning to die that day on another Kyuubi-fied mission to boost Konoha's political power and perhaps stop his rather pertaining life from keeping on its trek, he could tell Tsunade he'd do it some other day and go for food wasn't a very terrible second option.

It was that day did she notice how beautiful he was.

The sun was a dim, benign presence peaking over the buildings on a nice Konoha dusk, and she remembered falling in love—groggily, in the over looming shadow of her just completed twenty-four hour shift—with the world that had suddenly opened up to her depressing shadowed life, and allowed her to discover something new.

He was beautiful, his hair bright and tousled and bleeding gold in the after glow of a saffron sunset.

"We're going to the tea house downtown." She announced suddenly.

He was about to protest, when she cut him off rather indiscreetly. "They do nice tempura."

He couldn't argue with that.

Begrudgingly they trekked along, his pouting and her point the only thing that kept them in this fantasy world that everything was _okay_—they weren't broken, nothing was broken, everything was wonderful—and not from believing otherwise.

And by the time they got there, it didn't take any half-hearted banter to keep there conversation afloat, the menu did it for them.

"_Ramen!_"

She sipped her green tea triumphantly.

And she kept doing so, as her teammate and fellow comrade in the shattered and infamous Team Seven gorged himself on more ramen then she bothered to count.

Of course, when the desert tray was passed to there table, the borboun crème cheesecake only had seconds of shelf life before she had picked it up and devoured the thing hole.

He only blinked.

"Hey." She said feelingly. "I didn't distract you from _your _significant other, Superman."

Neither knew it as the banter that was between them became more truthful then the half-assed it was before, that they had suddenly felt not-so-shattered, and not so hopeless.

That they were making memories.

--

She had thought it was the last time.

Ever since things had changed, ever since things weren't so bad-not wonderful, but not bad-when the sky's bright after glow brought more than just a faded dream and shattered memories, when she didn't have to pick up the glassy broken pieces of herself off her bedroom floor every time she got up.

But nothing had changed.

Nothing.

Tsunade had called her out of the hospital, and she had actually been rather upset about the decision.

But then she realized why.

The Jounin over at the Hokage tower were whispering about it, the explosion that killed thousands over near Iwa, that the Konoha _weapon_—still after everything he'd done they called him that—had created. There was nothing grateful about the way they said it. No remorse in the fact he was in the hospital again.

((If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?))

She had cried.

He watched them splatter to the floor like small crystallites, wetting against the cleaned white tiles basking in the dawn. He was beautiful that day too, his hair bright and tousled and bleeding gold at the edges in the early light that filtered in, her long and remorse shadow stretching over his hospital bed.

He watched her with tired eyes, like a long and tired ocean, lapping against its shores with long tosses, stretching over an azure sky.

She watched him back.

She didn't know what to say, how to say it, why say it…but she knew that he got the point.

When she held his large hand with hers, all three gathering in harmony at the edge of his bed.

((If I'm alive and well, will you be there, holding my hand?))

This time when she cried—different from the pitiful sobs that she had made when Sasuke left, different then when her parents died, different then when Sai hit her over the nose, different, different—it wasn't like the way she usually did.

She cried for the shattered and broken memories that they had begun, scattering in the winds to fables.

_It's just Three Doors Down. _


End file.
